


Corvus Corax

by grayspider1974



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: F/M, a touch of voyeurism, strap ons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-04-20 19:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14267844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayspider1974/pseuds/grayspider1974
Summary: In which Ivar's sweet revenge is spoiled, so he seeks it in another way. Also, some of my characters from other stories appear here in different situations than they did originally...in a sense, this occurs in a different time line than my previous work!





	1. Chapter 1

Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrook the Wrath of God sang a little tune to himself, and if his gimp legs had allowed him to do so he would have danced.  
"Today's the day! Today's the day! Today that bitch is gonna die! Today's the day! Today's the day! You'll never see me cry!" he sang inside his head as Freydis lathered him up and shaved away the fuzz that had only recently started growing on his upper lip and applied a paint made from antimony to his face and khol around his eyes and placed a brand new crown made from whale's teeth on his head. Ivar thought he looked quite awesome as he gazed in the fine silver mirror that had been his Mumma's, then stolen and given to Lagertha's pet girl and then triumphantly reclaimed...but a viewer from a different age might be reminded of Johnny Depp in Dead Man. Ivar nodded and slapped Freydis on the bottom as she turned to put the mirror back on top of the dresser.   
Freydis giggled, and leaned over and sniffed. "You smell nice, too..." she said.  
"Thanks," said Ivar. "I had it specially made. That stuff Bjorn used smelled like whale barf, so I chucked it back into the sea from whence it came." He got up and walked over to the door. He had gotten used to the leg brace and no longer needed a crutch,but carried a slender cane carved in cunning forms both human and bestial from the tusk of a narwhal. "You look gorgeous too...c'mon!" They walked out arm in arm to the pier, which had been draped in red banners and lit with torches for the night's festivities. Ivar had gone to great lengths to put on the dog, but the general populace gathered on the pier looked frightened and dispirited as he gave his speech and led the main event of the evening out onto the pier in chains and with a bag over her head. He had considered blood-eagling the old harridan, but if someone kills your mother you do not send them to Valhalla to feast with the Gods by giving them such an honourable death, so he had decided to send Lagertha to sleep with the fishes instead.  
"Any last requests?" he asked politely.  
"Yes," said Lagertha. "Take this bag off my head, asshole. I want to look you in the eye as I die."  
Ivar giggled. "Anything else?"  
"Yup. Go fuck yourself you limp dicked little peckerwood..."  
"Sticks and stones, old trout...sticks and stones..." Ivar said, but he took out his little oyster knife and slit the bag so that Lagertha's big-haired head could poke out. "You won't see much down at the bottom of the harbour..." he added, just before something white and furry shot out of Lagertha's arms inside the sack. Pangur Ban hissed and flew at Ivar's face like a ball of eiderdown shot through with needles. Out of the corner of his eye he saw tentacles erupt from under the pier, but blood dripped in his eyes and obscured his vision. "Frig!" he thought as he topled backwards off the pier. "This is why I hate cats!" He hit the water with a splash, and the weight of his leg braces dragged him down through a maelstrom of tentacles and muscular people with freckled limbs and webbed hands and feet shot out from hiding under the pier. Someone grabbed Ivar under his armpits and hauled him up up into the air again and forced the water out of his lungs, and a pitched battle ensued between the populace of Kattegat and a handpicked force of Selkies aided by several tonnes of angry calamari.   
"Want some sausage?" asked a hulking man whose face would not have been handsome even before it had been violently chewed, and whose breath stank of ouzo and garlic. "You've got a pretty mouth, boy. Don't make me knock out your teeth. My name is Dimitri of Lesbos, and I work for the Lady Lou."  
"Screw you and the Lady Lou, whoever she is!" said Ivar.   
Dimitri grinned nastily and dangled a peculiar device that resembled the frame of a helmet except the nose guard extended further down to the level of the wearer's chin, and there was a projecting metal bar that looked like it was designed to go in the wearer's mouth and a strap that would go under the ears and fasten at the nape of his neck.   
"This should make you shut your yap," said Dimitri. "They call it a scold's bridle because down in civilized parts they put it on nagging wives. It gives their husbands peace for an hour or so." The device was pulled over Ivar's head and buckled tight before he could yell. "You're lucky you're a cripple, and that your brother doesn't want you harmed" said Dimitri. "I may be a borderline pedophile, but I'm not a paraphiliac." He stroked Ivar's cheek. "You're just at the perfect peach-fuzz stage, like Bjorn was when I met him. He was a beautiful boy with eyes as blue as yours and hair like butter and REALLY sharp teeth." Dimitri sighed, and tied the last knot of Ivar's bonds. "If he hadn't bitten off half my face, I would never have found God.:  
"Sweet Frig!" thought Ivar. "This bodily infamous wad of seafaring trash has an even bigger homoerotic crush on Bjorn than Halfdan the Black! I wonder if they..." He forced the thought out of his mind, because it was making him nauseous and if he vomited with the Scold's Bridle on he could aspirate on his own puke.  
'You're not going anywhere any time soon," said Dimitri. "By the time you're found, I'll be gone along with these fine lads and lassies and Bjorn's mother. Shame on you for trying to kill an old woman!'  
"Shame on her," thought Ivar, who was now dangling from one of the remaining support bems like a fly trapped in a spider's web. "She murdered my mother!" His mouth was starting to hurt from the Scold's Bridle "My dear, sweet beautiful mother..." His chest hurt as though it were about to burst. Then his stomach revolted again and bile came out his nose, but he managed to re-swallow the rest without it going into his lungs. "Frig!" he thought. "I'm going to smell and taste puke until Harald or Hvitserk or somebody else comes looking for me...I wish my parents had left me to the wolves when I was born!"

Lagertha was hustled on board the Stella Libertas by two hulking Caledonians with webbed hands and hair the colour of autumn leaves who had hauled her out of the harbour like a half-drowned cat and forced the air back into her lungs. She guessed that these were Selkies, like the strange, freckled creature that Ragnar had arranged to marry her son...and sure enough she saw Bellona fussing over Bjorn who sat in the bow of the Libertas clutching something in his immense hands and bawling. It took Lagertha a moment to realize that her son was holding his third wife's little blue hat, which was stained with blood.  
"Damn it Bjorn!" she thought. "You're a king, so act like one!" Then as the Great Hall suddenly erupted in flames, she realized that her son was no longer a king. "I lost his crown," she thought. "Oh, shit!'


	2. Occulae Azur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ivar falls ill, and Lagertha contemplates the fact that she has royally screwed up her son's life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They digitally alter Alex Hogh's eyes to give him blue scelera, which is a characteristic of people with osteogenesis inpefecta, and supposedly indicates elevated amounts of calcium in the blood. Jaundice appears when the liver is malfunctioning (usually in babies, but also in alcoholics and people who deliberately starve themselves) and tints the scelera yellow due to an excess of bilurubin. Fasting (including the "beer diet" in which the only calories consumed are in the form of alcoholic beverages, which in Norse traditions is said to be the preferred diet of Odin) was sometimes used as a way to induce an altered state of consciousness. Aldous Huxley describes it in his work The Doors of Perception, but thought it was even more dangerous than taking LSD.  
> Aslaug's occult abilities are played down a bit on Vikings, and they never use her nickname "Krauka", which means "raven."

"Hey, Hvitserk...how blue are my eyes?"  
The brown hand that clutched at Hvitserk's wrist was painfully thin. He really had no idea how long Ivar had been tied up under the pier, and while he seemed to have no actual injuries Ivar had stopped eating and would only sip a bit of wine or mead now and again. Over the past month he had taken to his bed and lost so much weight that he was starting to look a bit like Lagertha's skinny pet girl Astrid, who had been done in by her former partner and was now evidently mourned only by Harald Fairhair and her own mother.  
"Your eyes are fine, Ivar" said Hvitserk. "They're not too blue."  
"Don't lie to me, bro..." said Ivar. To tell the truth, the whites of his eyes were not blue, but somewhat greenish and Hvitserk had never seen them that colour before. He held out a bowl of blood soup, and told Ivar he needed to eat. "Don't want to eat," said Ivar. "I gotta be light if I'm gonna fly."  
"Fly?" asked Hvitserk.  
Ivar grinned from ear to ear. "I'm gonna fly away, bro...Mumma taught me how. She said when she slept her soul left her body in the shape of a raven. That's why they called her Aslaug Krauka...Caw! Caw!" He flapped his hands like the wings of a bird. "Gonna burst out of my chest and go flying across the sky like a comet, an' kill the bitch who murdered my mother. Gotta kill her, Hvitserk. I made a promise, and I'd rather break a bone than a promise...."  
Hvitserk felt his brother's face, which was blazing hot. "You're in no condition to do anything, bro..." he said. "Get some sleep." He tried to remember his mother's remedies, for like any good volva she knew about pine baths and mustard plasters and such and Hvitserk had tried to get her to teach him some of these things even though healing was women's work. His mother had never treated any illness that made a man's eyes turn greenish. Ivar's eyes looked enormous in his gaunt face, like those of some wild nocturnal animal trapped and injured and most likely dying. He soon closed them, and his face lost the hard, angry look that it had when he was awake, and as his breathing slowed Hvitserk was painfully aware of how young his brother was and that if the ever took him Ivar would not go to Valhalla to feast with the Gods, because if sickness took him Ivar would freeze in Hell. Hvitserk could not bear to see that happen, so he went and sharpened his axe, because if bad turned to worse he wanted Ivar to go as cleanly as possible. "To Valhalla, bro..." he said to Ivar's sleeping body. "To Valhalla..."

"The Caledonians," Lagertha thought "are the reason why someone built a honking big wall across Britain." After weeks on board the Stella Libertas with the tall, red-haired,freckled, enormously pregnant and completely insufferable Caledonian woman that Ragnar had seen fit to marr Bjorn off to and twenty or so Selkies that Bellona had introduced as "Mi familia" she was glad when they hove into Port Mackenzie and la familia decamped with Ubbe, leaving her with Bjorn, his wives, the equally annoying Taapiolan family, four clergymen that included the Greek Orthodox ship's chaplain and the ill-tempered Tir Manannan Twins, and Bishop Heahmund who spent most of his time below decks with a cold compress applied to his gonads thanks to an incident that had involved Bjorn's third wife Snafrid snaffling his balls.   
"To tell the truth, Mother" Bjorn had said "he's not the man he used to be, but he'll make a much better priest!" Lagertha had fixed her son with a basilisk stare, and he had looked down at her with the same wide, blue eyes that she had loved since Bjorn had been a baby. "He did not love you, Mother. I do. That's why I protected you from him like I should have done with all the others, including Father. You don't need people like that anymore. Bjorn wrapped his mother in his arms, each of which was thick as her leg.  
"What about Torvig?" Lagertha asked. "You need her!"  
"I have no interest in taking her into my bed now, but I will not wrong her as I did Thorunn." Now he had the same cold blue fire in his eyes that his father sometimes had. "And what about Astrid, Mother? You know as well as I do that she was already pregnant with my child when you let her get captured by Harald."  
Lagertha looked up at her son in shock.  
"Aethelstan told me so in a dream," Bjorn said "and I had a word or two with the Seer as well. The Seer told me that Astrid's baby would be the person who saved Ivar's sanity, and we need Ivar if we are to defeat Alfrid." Bjorn nodded slowly. "If you think Ivar is a monster, Alfred will be worse. I loved Aethelstan as I loved Father, but his bastard son will be the death of us all unless we put an entire continent between us and him, and even then I'm not sure we're safe. Pray to whatever god you like that it is so, Mother."  
"Frig!" thought Lagertha. "I was ready to die at the last battle, so why didn't you let the Valkyries take me?"


	3. Freydis Infuriens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hvitserk gets a lesson about treating women with respect

Ivar had bought Freydis with the intention of sacrificing her to the Gods, then apparently spared her life for reasons that would probably only make sense to Ivar. He had kept her, dressed her in his late mother's clothes and jewels, and treated her like a queen, but though they slept in the same bed they had evidently never had sex but lay curled together in each other's arms whispering and chortling and hatching arcane plots that hopefully would never see the light of day. Hvitserk guessed that she had some sort of magic like the odd little kantele player that was often at Bjorn's elbow...either that, or the only person who could tolerate being with Ivar for any length of time was another weird virgin like himself. However, if ivar died, Freydis would be the prime candidate to be gang-raped and then throttled on Ivar's funeral pyre, and this made Hvitserk's mouth go dry and his balls ache at the same time because it would be a crying shame to let a fanny like hers go to waste. He tried to bring the subject up at breakfast one morning, and Freydis had smiled sweetly, reached into his trousers...and twisted his balls.  
"You've got no respect for women, do you?" she asked. "You expect me to hop into bed with you like that idiot slut you and Ubbe and Sigurd were all balling?" Hvitserk had fallen off the stool he had been sitting on and was on the floor with tears welling from his eyes. "Like I don't know what happened to her after you all got tired of her? You think all a woman can be is a welcoming minge with no mind or feelings that you can fuck and the toss aside? Well, fuck you Hvitserk...your momma didn't teach you right!" She squatted on his chest and smacked his face. "Ivar is my friend. He actually talks and listens to me, and I talk and listen to him because he's funny and clever. And yes, Ivar and I have talked about me having sex with other men, but I like Harald."  
"Harald's an asshole!" cried Hvitserk.  
"So are you, Hvitserk...but he's smarter and stronger than you. I don't want stupid, weak children!" She smacked him again and stood up. "I would rather pussy up to Bjorn's bitch of a mother than sleep with you, Hvitserk!" she said, and dumped a bowl of porridge on his head before storming off.  
Hvitserk wiped gruel from his eyes and wondered how Ivar (who was himself practically a girl) had somehow managed to score a higher class of pussy than he himself had done.

A few days later, Hvitserk walked into his brother's room to find that the Serr had arrived unannounced and was fussing about with a fan made from a swan's wing and a bowl made from a bear's skull in which some sprigs of dried juniper smoked on top of a hot coal, while Magrethe (who had disappeared when Hvitserk and Ivar had re-taken Kattegat, but had evidently survived the battle) sponged Ivar down. She glowered at Hvitserk as he entered.  
"What are you doing here?" Hvitserk asked. "Shouldn't you be with Ubbe?"  
"He bugged out along with Queen Big Hair and her son and Torvig the Tart," Magrethe. "Don't mind me, I'm washing your brother. He stinks!" This was quite true, as Ivar had missed his weekly sauna. "Your momma did not teach her sons any respect for women, did she?"  
Hvitserk remembered the conversation he'd had with Freydis a week before. "I guess not," he said. "At least you look all right."  
"I've been sleeping on the Seer's chesterfield, thank you very much." said Magrethe. "He needs someone to take care of him. I clean and I cook and help him out as best I can."   
"I'm sorry," said Hvitserk.  
Magrethe sighed and looked down at Ivar, who lay on his back like one of those crucifixes the Christians put in their churches, carved from some exotic wood. His lips were dry and cracked and the skin was stretched tight over the fine cheekbones that had been a genetic gift from his mother, and Hvitserk could count his brother's ribs.  
"What's wrong with him?" Hvitserk asked the Seer.  
"To Tuonla he went down, to the Dead Land he went for power," said the Seer. "His spirit goes walking after midnight while the house of his spirit burns."  
"That makes no sense," said Hvitserk.  
"Nothing makes sense, because life is senseless," said the Seer as he checked Ivar's pulse. "He'll not last long unless we intubate him." He pulled the chanter from a set of bagpipes and a drinking horn whose tip had been sawn off from his sleeves, and a jar of pine resin. The resin was used to attach the horn to one end of the chanter, and Magrethe and Hvitserk were told to haul Ivar into a sitting position as the Seer slid the improvised feeding tube down Ivar's throat. Then they lay Ivar back down, and the Seer filled the horn with milk. "Goat or reindeer's milk are best," he said "and add a little honey." He pulled a jaw harp from another pocket of his robes.   
"What's that for?" Hvitserk asked.  
"I always like to play a bit of music while waiting for someone to either die or come back from the Dead Lands as your brother might if you give him a couple of days." The Seer lifted the small musical instrument that looked more like an instrument of torture to his lips and began to play. Hvitserk bustled out of his brother's room, wondering what had become of his axe, which had evidently been stolen from his room.


	4. Con Ailes Nero, Ivar Fugit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ivar takes flight in the Astral realm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "devil horns" commonly associated with heavy metal music actually represents the "horns of Luna" and was originally a sign AGAINST evil.

Ivar stretched his wings and cawed. In his astral body he was a handsome young raven with shiny black feathers, perched on the bed-post looking at the sad, spindly naked ape body that he usually wore. The Seer seemed to notice that he had left his body and got up to open the window for him and then went back to playing his jaw harp as Ivar fluttered out into the cool night air, muttering "ruk, ruck!" to himself. He perched on the sill of Hvitserk's open window, and saw that Hvitserk and Magrethe were curled together, and with the other sense peculiar to shamans and sorcerers and others who traveled in other realms he sensed the life in Magrethe's womb which was still only a cluster of cells.  
"Hullo, Sigurd" Ivar said. "I guess you've discovered that trying to ass-rape your own brother doesn't gain you much favour in Asgard, eh? Nor does repudiating your own mother, by the way!"  
"Fuck you, Ivar! said the spirit that had been Sigurd but was now on its way to becoming someone else.  
"You tried that when I was thirteen," said Ivar. "I'm amazed you didn't try to be reborn as a Greek...they're more accepting of people with your inclinations, or so I was told." Then the blastoma split down the middle and duplicated itself. "Looks like you're going to be one half of a set of identical twins, Sig!" Then a white raven flew past Ivar and entered Magrethe's belly. Ivar understood that this was his mother's astral form.  
"Hello, Ivar darling!" Aslaug said from the womb. She and Sigurd did not exactly talk because as of yet they had no mouths, but Ivar heard their voices inside his head.  
"Oh, sweet Frig..." Sigurd muttered, as a small brown bat fluttered into the room, circled a bit and then let out a disgruntled cheep. "I thought this would be less awful than freezing in Hell. The first chance I get I'm going to re-absorb you, Mother!"  
"If you do that we might end up being conjoined," said the shade of Aslaug as the bat fluttered around, squeaking and flying into things. "And you're too late, Astrid. Go find another minge to crawl into!"  
Ivar chortled as ravens do, and pecked at the astral bat. Astrid chittered in protest. "Don't blame me for your death," he said. "You should have known better than to trust a murderous bitch like Lagertha. Incidentally, Harald is utterly heartbroken because he thought he was the one who knocked you up." Ivar made a mental note to check on Harald before he left. "Whose was it? Bjorn's?"  
"Fuck Bjorn!" Astrid squeaked."And fuck his mother!"  
"That's precisely what you did, so don't complain. Hate yourself for being a fool, but don't hinder me, Astrid...I gotta fly!"

He fluttered over to Harald's place, which was a bachelor's fetid nest of dirty socks and half-eaten smorbrods. Ivar was not surprised to find Freydis there, because they had already discussed such things . What amazed him was Harald's heroic resolve in resisting Freydis's persistent and rather unladylike attempts to get on his pole. He heard a loud smack, and Harald growling.  
"I don't want to hurt you!" Harald said. "Please put your clothes back on. What would Ivar think?"  
"This was his idea," Freydis said. "He can't make babies, and I want one!"  
"Go ask Hvitserk!" said Harald.  
"I don't like Hvitserk," said Freydis. "He's a buckethead!"  
"Leave my pecker alone!" continued Harald ""It's not yours to play with!"  
"Oooooo, what's this?" asked Freydis. "I didn't know you had a cock ring..." She chortled softly. "You really are an adventurous fellow..."  
"No, I'm not!" Harald said. "I got it to please my princess. It got infected and I nearly lost my pecker...not that she cared!"  
"What a bitch!" Freydis said in a sympathetic tone.  
"And Astrid...I thought she was something wonderful but Ivar told me she was Lagertha's...special friend. You know how that turned out!"  
"Oh, you poor dear man!" said Freydis. She sounded like she meant it.  
"I'm done with women!" Harald concluded, and then burst into tears.  
Ivar pecked Astrid, who had followed him there. "Find another minge to crawl into," and if Freydis succeeds in getting Harald to impregnate her and I think it may be you I'll put ergot in her porridge and abort you." He then snapped Astrid up in his beak and flew off to the South.

Ivar flew much faster in astral form than an actual raven might, and by dawn he was circling the caldera of Mount Aetna, which was belching black smoke that would have choked a common crow. He dropped Astrid into the roiling, seething mass and croaked "Buh-bye, ya batty bitch!" as the squeaking bat-form plummeted. He was not too sure if being dropped into an active volcano would do lasting harm to an astral body, but he was pissed off at her for ruining Astrid's life and he did NOT want to see her twice in his life time. He swooped over the sunlit streets of Messina, narrowly avoiding an elderly woman who took a break from beating a rug to swing at him with her rug beater then make the "horns" sign at him and call him a "filio di puta!'  
Ivar quorked, because although the rug beater had missed him the "horns" had sent forth a palpable wave of energy that had nearly knocked him against the wall.  
"So witches can see me..." he thought. "That's interesting, but I gotta fly!" he swooped off to the East as Astrid suddenly shot out of the murk with her wings smouldering like the proverbial bat out of Hades.


	5. Byzantium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ivar reaches Byzantium, and gets a little lost and distracted but eventually finds what he came there for, but changes his plan when he realizes the cruelest thing he can do to his foe is to not let her die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hagia Sophia was first a church, then a mosque and is now protected by UNESCO. It is not actually dedicated to Christ or the Virgin Mary or to any of the saints but to an Old Testament allegorical figure called the Shekinah (Wisdom)or as Sophia to the Greeks.

The thing that Ivar had not known about Constantinople was that it was huge. He had thought that the tales about how large and opulent Paris had been had been wildly exaggerated, but Constantinople could eat Paris and crap it out whole three days later. He fluttered over a racetrack that looked like it could seat the entire population of Kattegat with room to spare, and a vast, domed temple of some sort that sat in a whirling vortex of spiritual power that nearly shredded his astral body, and over streets devoted to the sale of silk and ivory, gems and gold, wine and spices and slaves, and what he thought at first to be the home of some noble lord turned out to be a high-end brothel, where he fluttered around peering through the latticed windows and chortling like the dirty bird that he was, and spied a device that he thought Freydis would find amusing, and made a mental note to make one for her, but he quorked in alarm when he peered through the next window because the things the stout, grey-haired man was doing to a boy a little bit younger than Ivar himself was more Sigurd's sort of thing, so Ivar crapped on the head of a dwarf waiting outside the brothel with an ass and a honeycomb and flew off. Eventually he found a very large villa on the outskirts of the city, and saw a small figure doing arcane things under an olive tree. It took him a moment to recognize Kyllikylli Taapiolan, because she was dressed in the plain linen tunic of a Greek boy, and her head was completely bald. His second realization was that Kylli wasn't entirely a girl.  
"There's a few parts of Constantinople that would not be save for Kylli..." Ivar thought as he watched the small Karelian place her cousin's bloodstained blue cap atop a bust of Artemis, She then proceeded to chant and bob about, wafting the smoke from a bear's skull that she used as an incense burner towards the statue with a swan's wing. The shades of the former masters and mistresses of the villa stood in a circle around her, muttering to one another about the strange and pagan ways of the barbarians who had bought the villa after the last of their line had died. In life, she had been a sour old maid by the name of Domina Calpurnia, and her ghost squinted at Iivar and then turned into an eagle and screeched at him. Kylli paused in her activities, and peered up through the branches of the tree, but evidently mistook Ivar for a common crow. He fluttered around a bit and found Bjorn asleep in a sweaty tangle of limbs that appeared to contain at least three people in a bed that probably smelled a bit of sex and of Bjorn's signature scent, which in Ivar's opinion smelled like a whale had eaten a load of muskox testicles and then vomited in a spice shop. He recognized Thorunn, but not the big girl with the wild, fulvous mass of cinnamon-coloured hair and a fanny almost as nice as that of Ivar's girl Freydis. Ivar watched as she sat up, stretched like a cat (she was pregnant but moved with the grace of a healthy, young animal) plucked a few of the hairs that sprouted from her belly like copper wires, and blinked her inner eyelids, and stared right at Ivar, who quorked in alarm as he realized that this was Bjorn's OTHER wife, the ginger minge from Caledonia. He beat a hasty retreat as the girl grabbed a pillow and threw it at him. Down the hall was a mysterious room. Ivar had never seen a bathroom before, and was a bit baffled to find Lagertha lying in a large marble tub of water that looked like it had traces of iron in it. She seemed to be asleep at first, but Ivar saw that thee reddish tinge to the water came not from iron but from blood. "OH, HELL NOT!" he thought. "The old hag has cut her wrists. Uh-uh Lagertha, you're not going to get away so easily. I swore I would kill you, and you don't get to cheat me of that!" He perched on top of Lagertha's massive coiffure, and pecked at her forehead, right between her eyes. "LIVE, YA BITCH!" Ivar squacked "LIVE, AND SUFFER!"

Lagertha had closed her eyes and lay in the tub remembering what she had lost and would never have again. She remembered her far, and Ragnar and Gyda, and Bjorn as he had been when he was a fresh-faced lad of twelve or thirteen rather than the hulking tower of muscle that he had grown into, and Aethelstan....only somehow, Aethelstan was NOT Aethelstan in this memory, but someone else. She searched her memory for the name attached to this sly, brown face with its intense blue eyes, bladelike cheekbones and angry little mouth. This face belonged to a time twenty years later, after Gyda had died and she had left Ragnar and Bjorn had grown into a massive pervert. She glared at the young man who had taken Aethelstan's place sweeping up by the hearth, and snarled "Frig, Ivar...can't I die in peace?"  
Ivar grinned, showing his fine white teeth. His face was really rather handsome, but his mannerisms reminded Lagertha of a weasel or a rat, or maybe a crow. "No, you can't. You murdered my mother, and I swore that I would kill you but now I see that the cruelest thing I can do is not let you die. Live, bitch and suffer!" He looked around. "This was where you were happy, wasn't it?"  
Lagertha nodded. "This was my home, but Ragnar betrayed me." The scene was fading into darkness. "I did not realize how happy I was here, but your mother ruined everything."  
"That's a lie!" Ivar said. "Mother told me that you beat Father and humiliated him by offering to sleep with a slave, and that you eventually left him of your own free will and whored your way into your own Earldom, while Mother helped Father become a king. You were jealous of Mother because she was a queen in her own right, and despite the string of men you slept with you never rose above the rank of Earless, and never had any more children than you had with Father. Don't ask me to feel pity for you! I feel more pity for Bjorn because you treated him like an idiot and you cuckolded him, but when he did the same to you..." Ivar spread his hands. "You're an idiot if you don't understand that that skinny slut did exactly the same with you and your son as you did to become an Earless, but even Astrid didn't deserve what you did to her!" Suddenly the dim form that had been Gyda changed into Astrid's gangly frame, covered in her own blood. "You let Harald and his men take her, and when she found her way back to you you put her down like a bitch." Ivar snapped. "Harald had grown fond of her too, for some unfathomable reason. You're an evil, jealous harridan and death is too good for you! LIVE, BITCH, AND SUFFER!" At that point, Ivar found himself knocked outside of Lagertha's memory, fluttering about in corvid and screaming "LIVE, YA BITCH! LIVE, AND SUF....oh, Frig!" He dodged a fireball that Kylli had flung at him.   
"Suksun vittun!" Kylli snarled, and threw another fireball that set fire to the towel rack. Ivar realized that the small Karelian witch had probably seen him out by the olive grove after all. The ghostly form of her cousin Snafrid appeared, shouting "Get out.....or I swear by my pretty blue bonnet that I will end you!" so Ivar figured it really was a good idea to make himself scarce, so he flew off as Bjorn kicked down the bathroom door and bellowed. "OH MY GODS, MOTHER....THE BLOOD! BLOOD!" and hauled his mother's naked body out of the tub and grabbed one of the towels that had dropped to the floor when the towel rack had caught fire. As Ivar fluttered past, the shade of Domina Calpurnia sat in the olive tree preening her feathers.  
"Stupid bloody barbarians," she muttered. "They come and take our land and think they're better than us, but whenever a crisis happens they panic, and all Hades breaks loose. She spread her wings like the Legionary Standard of old and screeched.

Freydis shouted for help when the gaunt form on the bed suddenly sat up. Ivar seemed to be fighting for air, clawing at his throat with bony fingers....but though his eyes were wild, the greenish tinge had subsided a bit. Hvitserk managed to yank the feeding tube from Ivar's gorge. Ivar retched a bit but brought up only bile, then sat for a moment blinking and staring as though he had been imprisoned in a dark place for a month. "Quork....ruk, fuck?" he asked, as though he had forgotten human speech but still spoke the language of corvids, then "Shit, Hvitserk...how long was I out?"  
"Three days," said Hvitserk. "The Seer said to wait three days, before...." He drew his thumb across his throat. "My axe was good and sharp, but somebody stole it. Better that than letting you freeze in Hell. You look like shit, by the way."  
'I feel like shit," said Ivar. "And I've been to Hell. It's inside Lagertha's head. I wanted to kill her, but I saved her life. He licked his dry lips. "Dying's too easy for that bitch. It's living that's hard. I WILL kill her some day, but only when she comes to me and begs for death." He chortled, and beckoned Freydis over. "I saw something that you might like as a little treat...or maybe not so little. How big a cock would you want?" Freydis sat on Ivar's bed, and he explained to her the strap-on phallus that he had glimpsed through a whorehouse window in the vast and decadent city of Constantinople. "It was about ten inches long and made from ivory, but you may want one a little smaller because....well...a big one might hurt. The harness would be made from very soft leather..." Freydis giggled, and Hvitserk quietly started edging away, unwilling to get involved in whatever deviant plan his brother and his depraved girlfriend were planning. '....of course, if you want to have babies, you'll have to settle for Hvitserk if Harald doesn't want to do it..."  
"Fuck Hvitserk!" Freydis said.  
"You just might have to," said Ivar. Hvitserk quietly closed the door and went to find Magrethe.


End file.
